Dirk Knemeyer

Internet Security & Behavioural Dysfunction

Internet Security & Behavioural Dysfunction, October 27, 2016

When I do have internet outages, I will tell you, it makes me feel like a comedy character in a dystopian sci-fi show. Which is to say, I’m there just like, “Start working, start working, start working.” It’s not like, you know I go home, “Okay, let me go and read some poetry now,” right? I don’t have this normal flexible response. I’m just like this automaton like, “I need you to start working again. I need you to start working again. I need you to start working again.” Which always makes me feel a little bit self aware, but it doesn’t change my behavior. This may be apropos of nothing, but I think the loss of the internet, I’ll just speak for myself personally, is pretty crucial at this point.

It’s always-on, and it’s immediate. Which is to say more than just being on. Whenever we want something it just immediately appears. It’s not like we make a request, the request goes away for a while, and then something comes back to us when it’s ready, right? It’s just always ready.

If you think about in the physical world, how do you protect against viruses? How do you protect against diseases? You need a safe room. You need to go in a place that’s totally cut off from the bad environment and the good environment, and you need to detox. Then you need to take that detox into the good environment, right? Internet is always on. It’s always in and out, and in and out, and in and out. There isn’t that notion, really, of the safe room. The safe room is required, I believe, to make things truly safe. To make things really … To have a chance even to make things bulletproof from hackers. That would by definition require not immediacy in response. It would require things being held up. Being taken into an environment where they could be scrubbed and cleaned and washed. In a world of AI, that starts to become more possible from a speed perspective. Maybe to solve it, there’s a lag in our relationship between sending requests out and getting the information. Getting the transaction back. That would be weird to deal with, right?

My perception is that a service like Netflix could be relatively immune from that. The virtue of that is it is streaming a chunk of information at you, right? If you assume that all Netflix engineers are not corrupt. If you assume there isn’t hacking going on inside the Netflix organization, they should be able to create a climate that is protected, basically. To take simple data requests from us that aren’t more sophisticated packets, then stream back this giant pipe of, “Here’s The Hunt for Red October.”